Flash Fiction

On Consolation

If I gave you a character — say, a woman, a transwoman, tall, not particularly feminine, occasionally accidentally attractive — would that satisfy? What if we place her in a bookstore, a small independent bookstore where she is walking slowly past the tables with books on display, gazing at the covers, seeking ones she may be familiar with, and ones she’s not, but might want to be? What if she stops, takes a book, flips to the back cover, skims it, turns to the dust jacket, skims again, then closes the book, setting it back on the table? What if she looks up and sees a man opposite her doing the same with his half of the table, running his tanned hand across the cover of a book titled: Dostoyevsky in Love? At this point do you feel a kind of dramatic tension? Do you suspect some kind of exchange of energies? Will a small, smoldering ember ignite into a flame of barely remembered lust? Are we that starved for love? Or have we been that starved and unaware? Let’s have him look up, establish eye contact with her. His brown, hers hazel. Both sets of eyes approximately equal in life experience, common things witnessed. His more familiar with unfamiliar places, hers more familiar with the inconstancy of the familiar. Let her smile reflexively, a sweet smile that he won’t see because, like everyone else, she is wearing a mask, more as an act of concern for others than a defensive barrier. She doesn’t know if he returns her smile from behind his mask, but in her mind she has him do so. Let’s imagine a swirling magnetic field of mutual desire beginning to form in the air above the book display. A not uncommon experience now that everyone is so sequestered, so guarded, so often alone. Tension builds. Each feels this tension as though they have taken hold of a strand of wool, feeling the gentle tug of the other’s hold on the strand. Because she is so inexperienced in this art, so desirous of human connection — and for that very reason suspicious of it — she let’s go. She looks down at the table again, scans the field of books, and stops on a title: On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times.